Putting a powerful planning tool in everyone’s hands

If knowledge is power, then a new computer modeling program just unveiled by the Cape Cod Commission might very well both empower the public, and help solve our wastewater crisis.

Dan Wolf

If knowledge is power, then a new computer modeling program just unveiled by the Cape Cod Commission might very well both empower the public, and help solve our wastewater crisis.

Here’s what this new tool will do:

Anyone – engineers, public officials, neighborhood activists, insomniacs – will be able to single out any piece of Cape Cod, big or small, one town or more, then analyze and compare how much septic treatment in that section would cost based on how much treatment you want.

It’s a remarkable, grassroots planning tool, one of the first of its kind, not as exciting as a video game but with real interactive qualities. And it’s designed to allow us to do exactly what we need when it comes to wastewater treatment, and management: Get smart, get everyone involved, and solve this crisis as inexpensively as possible.

Without getting into too much of the nuts and bolts, here’s what will happen:

Anyone will be able to go on-line and call up this tool, hopefully before the end of the year.

You can then highlight an area on a map – could be Route 28, could be a subdivision, could be a watershed, could be a neighborhood, you name it.

You then select how much treatment you want to bring to that area, ranging from leaving existing septic systems as they are, improving them for nitrogen removal, small-scale treatment facilities, all the way to a centralized treatment plant fed by pipes running under the roads.

Based on best data about what’s in place, and what might be built going forward, the program then shows you approximate costs per home for the various levels of treatment.

You can make your target area bigger or smaller, in one town or many, embracing a full watershed or a sub-area. And then you can experiment, do it again, expand and contract, keep tinkering with size and scale.

Of course, a program like this is only as good as the data that’s plugged in. So the Cape Cod Commission will make every assumption, every input, transparent and available for everyone to examine.

This is a real game-changer. It will give town planners granular, in-depth information that until now has been in the hands of high-priced engineers. It will allow friends and neighbors to enter the conversation at a very high level. It will let us all test our assumptions, putting crucial decisions into the public domain.

This kind of tool is policy-neutral. It doesn’t offer a solution, and then work backward. It tries to deliver as much information with as much flexibility and inclusiveness as possible. It gives people, towns, planners, what they need to get creative and come to their own conclusions.

The state budget passed last spring included $150,000 for wastewater planning. We’re now seeing how that money has been used. Hats off to the Cape Cod Commission for this approach, understanding that creative technology needs to engage the public, not just the “professionals,” and then help get us to the best possible solution to our wastewater problems.

So far, the Commission has rolled out what they call a “beta” of this new software, a test and first pass. Work continues, with more demonstrations planned for a Smarter Cape conference in May. A working version for all towns is expected by the end of the year, with further improvements so it can become Web-based, meaning anyone can call it up from any computer connected to the Internet.

And then the real fun begins.

I hope and expect that we’ll see all kinds of creative suggestions about how to treat wastewater, and how to save money doing it. I’ll look forward to that, because I believe so strongly that offering good information leads to good dialog, good dialog leads to good process, and good process leads to good results. We may decide to solve our problems in a variety of ways, including town by town, but one fact I learned as this new tool was unveiled argues for collaboration:

There are 46 watersheds on Cape Cod that are now classified as nitrogen-impaired. Two-thirds of those cross town lines.

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